I wonder if they meant to specify StarCraft (1) or.. StarCraft 2, first of all. I'm assuming SC2 since it mentions 3D, but this all seems a bit out of the blue. Is DeepMind really that diverse that it just looks at SC2 and says "okay, I got this."

Lavarinth wrote:I wonder if they meant to specify StarCraft (1) or.. StarCraft 2, first of all. I'm assuming SC2 since it mentions 3D, but this all seems a bit out of the blue. Is DeepMind really that diverse that it just looks at SC2 and says "okay, I got this."

I guess so, I just got the news from Simfish and some of my other friends at HeavenGames. I think DeepMind is gonna go either way with StarCraft 1 or 2, maybe both. Don't think it matters for the AI. But I wouldn't be surprised if they aim at the latter for their AI testing.

Last edited by Enkidu on Mon Mar 14, 2016 1:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hey, I remember that! IskatuMesk made Zapoc right? A very powerful Zerg AI and I remember him actually testing it against an equally superior Protoss AI and both AIs kept fighting each other indefinitely. I wonder if Google develops an AI like DeepMind for StarCraft Broodwar or SC2, what would that be like for ZAPOC?

By the way, I have been, sort of, hoping to try out in StarCraft AI Competition.

ZAPOC was already bested by a Swedish guy's AI. We talked about it and most I can conclude is that pyAI has less conversion issues than bwaiscript (his script is rather similar to mine but they perform really differently for reasons I don't care to research). Either way neither of them stand a chance against a BWAPI script that so much as attacks with a single worker because of how broken the game is. Google won't develop anything that challenges established BWAPI scripts and then will give up.

SC2 doesn't support botting like BWAPI and Blizzard would ban you for trying, and Galaxy is too limited to do anything reasonable with, so unless they manually trigger it over the course of many years like Turtles is doing they'll give up there just as fast.

IskatuMesk wrote:ZAPOC was already bested by a Swedish guy's AI. We talked about it and most I can conclude is that pyAI has less conversion issues than bwaiscript (his script is rather similar to mine but they perform really differently for reasons I don't care to research). Either way neither of them stand a chance against a BWAPI script that so much as attacks with a single worker because of how broken the game is. Google won't develop anything that challenges established BWAPI scripts and then will give up.

SC2 doesn't support botting like BWAPI and Blizzard would ban you for trying, and Galaxy is too limited to do anything reasonable with, so unless they manually trigger it over the course of many years like Turtles is doing they'll give up there just as fast.

Wait really? That was something I didn't know. So SC2 doesn't support botting like BWAPI does? Okay, so what does Google's DeepMind intend to do with StarCraft then, IskatuMesk?

If they don't intend to work with Brood War then they probably haven't done any research. SC2 is far more limited than it first appears. It took us forever to find a functional solution for the game's AI that performs even remotely well, and it's nothing comparable to what you can do in Brood War. Problem for that is BWAPI has been around for years with tournaments reinforcing the abilities of existing contributors. If one's intent is to compete with that, they're in for disappointment. So, I expect them to give up once they get their feet wet or only produce mediocre results and be quickly forgotten about.

I'm assuming they're going to use deepmind in the player slot as opposed to actually writing AI. If that's the case I can see it being better at SC2 since there's more ESPORTS bullshit like larva injection that an AI can manage better than a person.